The government of Nigeria has arrested and detained two executives of the Binance crypto exchange platform.
According to Financial Times (FT), a UK-based business news outlet, the unnamed Binance executives were arrested by Nuhu Ribadu, the national security adviser on Friday, and their international passports were confiscated.
FT gathered that the executives flew to Nigeria following the country’s decision to ban several cryptocurrency trading websites last week.
Officials did not provide details on why the Binance employees are being detained and it remains unclear on whether they have been charged with any violations of Nigerian law.
In an anxious week for Nigeria’s crypto industry, regulators made significant changes, blocking access to the websites of several exchanges and pegging USDT/NGN exchange rates.
Apart from Binance, other platforms such as Forextime, OctaFX, Crypto, FXTM, Coinbase, and Kraken, among others were also blocked.
On Wednesday, several crypto exchanges barred users from buying the USDT and USDC stablecoins.
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) on Tuesday raised concerns over $26 billion that flowed through Binance Nigeria over the past year from “unidentified sources”.
CBN Governor, Olayemi Cardoso, expressed worries over the significant volume of transactions passing through Binance Nigeria, emphasizing that the origins and beneficiaries of these funds are yet to be adequately identified.
“We are concerned that certain practices go on that indicate illicit flows going through a number of these entities and suspicious flows at best.
“In the case of Binance, in the last one year alone, $26 billion has passed through Binance Nigeria from sources and users who we cannot adequately identify,” he stated.
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